Archive | November, 2009

The Facebook/Scamville fallout has continued with a cage-fight between two of our favorite bloggers. In the red corner we have Dennis Yu, the CEO of BlitzLocal, who two weeks ago confessed his scammy past in a controversial post on TechCrunch.

In the blue corner we present Shoemoney, the heavyweight in this contest. In two blazing posts this week Jeremy has pummeled Dennis for a variety of alleged sins. You can gauge the tone by the titles of Jeremy’s posts:

Google has announced that with immediate effect it will permanently ban any AdWords advertisers that place scam or malware ads. This news may be taken in combination with the news of the Senate report discussed above, the FTC prosecutions pending in Minnesota and the Facebook/Scamville events of the last couple of weeks to illustrate that deceptive ads have reached critical mass online, and people are actually starting to do something about it.

Webloyalty, Vertrue and Affinion, along with over 450 of their e-commerce partners, were accused in a Senate report on Tuesday of “harming large numbers of American consumers” and of using “aggressive tactics” to bring in combined revenues of $1.4 billion.

In a name-and-shame effort, the report outlined a combination of deceptive offers, scammy continuity programs and many big-name merchants effectively selling credit card details to third-parties in return for CPA payments or other remuneration.

The number of performance marketing networks has gone through the roof in the last year as the technology needed has become more accessible. There’s no reason not to work with several networks at once but you should bear the following points in mind:

The Facebook Scamville controversy has roiled on this week. It made enough noise to get covered by Newsweek and Time magazine. A video tape surfaced on which the CEO of Zynga, Mark Pincus, admitting he had “done every horrible thing in the book” to get revenues. And Facebook announced that since July they had, “disabled two entire ad networks and suspended or brought into compliance over 100 applications for ad-related violations.”